|Introduction

Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-48910-2 — The Political Life of an Epidemic Simukai Chigudu Excerpt More Information Introduction |Stories and Politics of Cholera I am bored, but there is a great deal that is interesting in cholera if you look at it from a detached point of view. —Anton Chekhov, Letters of Anton Chekhov, 1892 In August 2008, the impoverished high-density townships of Harare’s metropolitan area were engulfed by a devastating cholera outbreak. The epidemic quickly spread into peri-urban and rural areas in Zimbabwe before crossing the country’s borders into South Africa, Botswana, Zambia and Mozambique. Over the course of ten months, the disease infected over 98,000 people and claimed over 4,000 lives; with an exceptionally high case-fatality rate at the peak of the epidemic, Zimbabwe’s 2008 cholera outbreak has been deemed the larg- est and most extensive in recorded African history (Mason 2009). Epidemiologically, the outbreak can be explained by the breakdown and cross-contamination of the city’s water and sanitation systems. Such a reading, however, belies the complex interaction of political, economic and historical factors that initially gave rise to the dysfunc- tion of the water systems, that delineate the socio-spatial pattern of the outbreak, and that account for the fragmented and inadequate response of the national health system (Musemwa 2010). Cholera then was not only a public health crisis; it also signalled new dimension to the country’s deepening political and economic crisis in 2008, which brought into question the capacity and legitimacy of the state. In this book, I am not seeking to address the cholera outbreak as a technical problem to be solved or to be prevented in future. Indeed there already exists a rich epidemiological literature speaking to this very question (see, for example, Neseni and Guzha 2009; Stephenson 2009; Hove-Musekwa et al. 2011; Luque Fernández et al. 2011; Mukandavire et al. 2011; Luque Fernandez et al. 2012). Instead, this book is about the political life of the cholera epidemic. It examines the epidemic’s origins, the pattern of its unfolding, its social impact, official 1 © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-48910-2 — The Political Life of an Epidemic Simukai Chigudu Excerpt More Information 2 Introduction and communal responses to it, and its aftermath in civic and public life. Across different institutional settings, competing interpretations and experiences of cholera created a series of charged social and political debates about the breakdown of Zimbabwe’s public health infrastructure and failing bureaucratic order, about the scope and limits of national and international agencies in the delivery of disaster relief, and about the country’s profound levels of livelihood poverty and social inequality. Examining the political life of this epidemic offers compelling insights into politics, humanitarianism, social inequality, the state and citizenship in Africa. This book sets out to answer three principal questions. First, what were the historical and political-economic factors that account for the origins and scale of the cholera outbreak? Through this question, I explore how the cholera outbreak maps onto a dense and complex political history of the establishment, transformation and disruption of urban order in Harare. Such an analysis sheds new light on changes in Zimbabwe’s bureaucracy, on its contentious urban politics, and on the co-constitutive entanglement of the material environment (such as Harare’s hydraulic infrastructure) with social arrangements (such as how people live in, manage and negotiate urban spaces). Second, how did different organisational entities, communities and individuals act in response to the cholera outbreak? Through this question, I explore how one disease, cholera, gave rise to many different crises thereby engendering multiple, often competing experiences of the outbreak as well as multiple, often competing modes of addressing it. In effect, cholera took on a variety of forms depending on where and by whom it was encountered. Cholera’s fraught politics emerge from the multiple crises it engendered and from in its embeddedness in extant political conflicts and social relations. Third, how has the cholera outbreak been committed to historical memory and what political subjectivities has the epidemic generated? Through this question, I explore the myriad memories and meanings that cholera has left in civic and public life. I uncover these meanings from the stories people tell about the outbreak. I consider why these narratives take the forms that they do. And I examine what political subjectivities these stories reveal after such a marked period of social suffering. Cholera as an indicator and a test of social and political systems has occupied a central place in much of the non-medical literature on the subject, and it provides a guiding thread that runs through this book. © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-48910-2 — The Political Life of an Epidemic Simukai Chigudu Excerpt More Information Introduction 3 The historian Richard Evans (2006: 474), in his ground-breaking history of cholera in Hamburg in the latter part of the nineteenth century, advocates the study of the disease in this manner but rightfully cautions that ‘we need to be very careful and circumspect in handling this way of approaching cholera.’ In Evans’s survey of the literature on the great cholera outbreaks of Europe’s industrial revolution, he notes a tendency among historians to ascribe to cholera the power to bring about ‘social breakdown’ or to reinforce ‘social stability’. He notes, for instance, historical accounts of the 1832 cholera outbreak in Britain, in which it is argued that cholera did not usher in ‘social breakdown’, but instead acted as ‘a stimulus to a whole range of sanitary reforms, to a series of transformations in the administration of public health, to the initiation of major schemes of slum clearance, and to long-term improvements in housing and living conditions’ (Evans 2006: 473). While expressing admiration for such studies, Evans critiques the analytical imprecision with which terms such as social stability or its breakdown are invoked. Moreover, he argues, ‘it takes a lot more than an epidemic to cause the destruction of a political and social system’ (Evans 2006: 474) or, for that matter, to radically transform it. Social transformation, stability or breakdown are always a matter of politics. For Evans, the cholera outbreaks that plagued social and political life in Hamburg in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are best understood as ‘events that ... might perhaps be ultimately insignificant in themselves, but nevertheless, as in a flash of lightning, illuminate a whole historical landscape’ (Evans 2006: 567). As he elegantly articulates it, during a cholera outbreak, ‘the workings of state and society, the structures of social inequality, the variety of values and beliefs, the physical contours of everyday life, the formal ideologies and informal ambitions of political organisations’ (Evans 2006: ix) are all thrown into sharp and detailed relief. The study of cholera, therefore, reveals a great deal about a society through the factors that led to its emergence, through its unfolding and through its consequences. I approach this study of Zimbabwe’s 2008–09 cholera outbreak along similar lines: as an event that might ultimately be insignificant in itself but one which opens a window unto many aspects of the country’s historical, social and political landscapes that are otherwise left obscure. Over the coming pages, I travel with cholera through time and space to illuminate the urban history of Harare and the structural factors that © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-48910-2 — The Political Life of an Epidemic Simukai Chigudu Excerpt More Information 4 Introduction have left high-density residential areas prone to diarrhoeal disease outbreaks; to show that the political disruptions wrought by Zim- babwe’s post-2000 crisis had unforeseen and catastrophic consequences for human health; to reveal the inherently pluralistic nature of an epidemic and the divisive politics that accompany it; and to make apparent how a medical nightmare marks the social contours of life and death, belonging and exclusion, privilege and abjection within the body politic. Situating the Book A study conceived along the lines described above necessarily cuts across conventional disciplinary boundaries. This project is emphatic- ally not a specialist work of public health or social epidemiology. I approach a public health event from the point of view of an interdis- ciplinary social scientist rather than a health scientist. My thinking has been informed by work in the disciplines of politics, history, sociology and anthropology. My goal is to link the structural (politics, econom- ics, history) to the subjective (experiences, memories, imagination) through the prism of cholera. In the following subsections I discuss the literatures I draw upon to make this analytical move. Political Order and the Bureaucratic State Throughout the annals of African political history, scholars from wide- ranging intellectual traditions and theoretical inclinations have grappled with how best to conceptualise the African state, its political and economic trajectory,

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